Hitting #2 on its first week in the charts, Down on the Upside by Soundgarden is the second Soundgarden album I've reviewed. Following up the massive hit Superunknown was always going to be difficult, and Down on the Upside probably did just about as well as could be hoped. It had a few big hits, including Blow Up the Outside World and Burden in My Hand.

As the final album before a 15 year hiatus, it is a good continuation of Soundgarden's sound. If you're in the mood for some grunge, but you don't want to hear Smells Like Teen Spirit or Black Hole Sun again, this is a decent option.

In January I posted about a house for sale in Boulder that I was slightly obsessed with. You can click through that link for the full story, but the short version is the sellers were asking for too much money for over a year. I had a bet with myself that the final sale price would be no more than $2.3 million. I can happily report that I was 100% correct: the house sold two days ago for $2,225,000, over a million dollars below the initial asking price.

As glad I am to be correct, I hope the developer/seller didn't lose money. I want new housing to be built in Boulder, and if developers lose money, that won't happen. At the same time, I don't want sellers (including private parties) being overly greedy, and I do have a little bit of schadenfreude when unreasonable sellers are shown that the housing market can have some logical sense.

There's very similar new build, unsold house in Boulder that was initially listed just after the one above. It hasn't sold likely because it has yet to fall below 70% of its initial asking price. It is also being sold by a developer. I probably won't post about it when it sells, but the fact that it hasn't sold yet, when the one above has, should tell the developer that they need to lower the price more (and be less greedy).

Sadly, there's always truly greedy (and/or delusional) developers, like this one. They have dropped the price less than $150,000 over a year and a half on an initial asking price of $4.7 million. By my math, they need to drop by at least ten times that before it will sell. I hope they enjoy paying property taxes, insurance, utilities, and the construction loan on an empty house for another 15 years!

Debuting at #6 in its first week on the charts, Older by George Michael was his attempt at more mature music (hence the name of the album). According to the Wikipedia page, the album was very successful in the UK and Europe, but less so in the United States.

Personally, I have no use for a more mature George Michael. His catalog of pop music with Wham! is all I really want or need from him. Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Careless Whisper, and Last Christmas (at the right time of the year) are some of the best pop songs ever made. His first solo album Faith is also excellent because he didn't try to get away from his pop roots. Older is trying too hard, and that's not what I want from George Michael.

My recommendation is to skip this album but definitely check out his earlier work.

Hitting #4 in its first week on the charts, The Great Southern Trendkill is the second Pantera album I've reviewed. I closed that review by writing "I could only take one listen to this album. I didn't like it at all. I like various kinds of metal, but not this kind." I feel the same about this album. You can skip it.

Debuting at #2, the album Crash by Dave Matthews Band, has their biggest ever single, Crash Into Me. Thirty years later it continues to have decent airplay and on Spotify, Crash Into Me has 130% more plays than their second most popular song, Ants Marching. The ratio is similar on last.fm.

I have always been pretty neutral about Dave Matthews Band. I find the music inoffensive but not all that moving. It's almost never something I choose to listen to, but I don't skip it when it comes on. Crash is very 90s, and certainly if I wanted some 90s nostalgia, it would be a solid choice. I suggest that if you want to try to capture the 90s for a few songs, you can put it on.

Finally, whatever your opinion is of Dave Matthews Band, they don't rock.

Hitting #1 in its first week, this is the second Hootie & the Blowfish album I've reviewed. I can't recall ever hearing any of the songs off this album before, and according to last.fm, it's entirely likely I'm correct.

My feelings on this album mostly mirror that of Cracked Rear View. It's fine. Extremely 90s. Listen to it, or don't. Whatevs.

I've always preferred Rage Against the Machine's eponymous first album over Evil Empire. That being said, this weeks #1 album is wholly worthy of that position.

Thirty years later, the machine is still very much active. Look at who is in the White House, has control of Congress, and the Supreme Court. We have a wannabe fascist president, a congress that has abdicated their constitutional powers, and a SCOTUS that rules based on desired political outcomes. AI is coming to take our jobs away, only the very rich are getting ahead in this economy, and the US is steadily ruining our democracy via gerrymandering and media that spreads lies and misinformation. Rage Against the Machine is no longer making music, but they remain as relevant as ever. I always enjoy reading stories about idiots (AKA conservatives) who don't understand they're the machine being raged against.

My recommendation is to listen to this album whenever you need to get angry about things you should get angry about. This is unfortunately all the time at the moment.

I really like this art from Kid #1. It's all doodles but I like the colors. It reminds me of the late 1980s or early 90s. I could imagine these shapes on some clothes worn by a cast member of Saved by the Bell.

I don't have much to say about this week's #6 album. I was never all that into Geto Boys, and The Resurrection didn't change my mind. Perhaps the most notable thing about the album is that the second song on the album, "Still", was used in the famous printer smashing scene of the movie Office Space. I have no strong opinions if you should listen to this album, which I suppose means it's probably not worth your time.

I am super late on this review by almost two weeks, so I'll make this short. Tiny Music... Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop by Stone Temple Pilots hit #4 in its first week on the charts. Tiny Music is worth your time. Check it out!

According to this web page I found, despite breaking up in 1969/1970, Beatles albums continued to be released fairly regularly in the years since. I've already reviewed two of them, Live at the BBC and Anthology 1. Any new Beatles album has a good chance of reaching the top ten of the charts. Indeed I'll review Anthology 3 in November of this year, and if I'm still doing this in four years, 1 in December of 2030.

This review of Anthology 2 (sitting at #1 on the charts) is basically the same as my earlier ones. This is an album of outtakes, rarities, and live performances that clocks in at over two hours. This is not the way to be introduced to the Beatles. But if you're already familiar with their body of work (and if you're not, how? why? what? where? who? how?), an occasional listen to this is a good idea.

Circa 1999 I went on a road trip with some college friends to the Lava Beds National Monument in Northern California and Crater Lake in Oregon. The Lava Beds is in the middle of nowhere close to absolutely nothing of importance. I can't remember if we forgot to pack enough cassette tapes of music¹, or we wanted to see what was on the radio, but we discovered an all Céline Dion, all the time radio station. It was the only station that came in, so we listened to it for a while. It didn't play any advertisements, so we suspected it was a pirate radio station. It is entirely likely that during that trip was the most recent time I've listened to as much Céline Dion as I did for Falling Into You.

The album hit #2 in its first week on the charts. Apparently it's her most successful album by number of sales and has won many awards. It featured the song Because You Loved Me written for the movie Up Close & Personal. I don't think I've ever heard the song before nor watched the movie (and I won't be remedying the latter).

It may not surprise you that I didn't care for this album, and I will not be listening to it again. I guess lots of people like(d) it, but lots of people can be wrong: there's evidence of that everywhere, just look around.

1. The car didn't have a CD player and 1999 was before iPods and cell phones that played music, kids! ↩︎

A few months ago I reviewed the soundtrack for the movie Dangerous Minds and wrote "the album is defined by and entirely worth the value of (the song) Gangsta's Paradise, and the rest is worth forgetting." While this week's #9 album Gangsta's Paradise by Coolio does have the song of the same name, it contains more hits than the movie soundtrack. In addition to (the song) Gangsta's Paradise, 1, 2, 3, 4 (Sumpin' New) charted quite well, as well did a cover of Too Hot.

This album isn't half bad. I'm not sure I'll listen to it much going forward, but I didn't find it objectionable. I suppose that's faint praise, but compared to soundtrack, it's much more worth your time.

This review is a week late. Last week was spring break and I went on vacation. I'll keep this short!

Hitting #3 in its third week on the charts, The Score by Fugees is their second and final studio album.

Despite the popularity of The Score, the only song I think I've heard before is the cover Killing Me Softly. That song was everywhere in 1996. Two of the members of Fugees, Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean, have gone onto even better things post-Fugees. The third Fugee, Pras, did not go onto better things. He is in prison for funneling foreign money to Obama's second presidential campaign.

Overall, it's good hip-hop and worth a listen.

Starting in February of this year I decided to ride my bike on every road in Boulder. Every neighborhood, every dead-end, and every circle. I didn't do very much detailed planning for this. I didn't try to optimize my routes to minimize distance. I figured that the worst case was that I rode my bike a bit extra, and that's fine by me. Even with perfect planning there are road configurations that require some duplication anyway, so I wasn't bothered by repeating segments more than once. Also, since this was always going to be a multi-day endeavour, I knew I would have to repeat some segments that brought me to neighborhoods starting from my home.

To be clear, I didn't ride every road completely, I had some rules:

• I didn't ride dangerous roads. There are a few very busy roads in Boulder that lack a safe place to ride; they don't even have a gutter bike lane. No one paid me to do this, and being super-ultra complete isn't worth the danger
• I didn't do alleys. I love a good alleyway, and when I'm dictator I will require them to be built everywhere, but I didn't ride them for this project

• I limited myself to roads actually in the city of Boulder. There are unincorporated islands within the city of Boulder, and I didn't ride in those unless I used them to get to other roads. For example, there are a number of unincorporated islands pictured below and I didn't do some of these roads

  

• There is some ambiguity about when a road is actually in Boulder and not. Some city boundaries run along roads as pictured below. City roads have blue and white signs, while county roads are given green and white signs. Some of these border roads have green signs, and some have blue. In general I would use the color of the street sign to guide me as to if it was a city or county road. As an aside, I ended up riding on the road below because I used it to get to a part of Boulder that is only accessible via county roads

  

• If a street had a "Private road, no city maintenance" sign, I didn't ride on it. Some private streets have green signs, which I would skip. I made two exceptions: NCAR and NIST. These are (semi-)governmental entities and therefore aren't private. Both are contained in city limits, so I felt it was appropriate to ride on them. I probably ended up riding on private roads here and there, but if they had a blue sign and no "Private street" sign, I figured it was fine for me to use it

• Similarly, I didn't do parking lots and other obviously private roads, like the roads in the IBM campus
• Some roads are under construction, and are either inaccessible or a complete mess. I avoided these as necessary or prudent
• I only needed to ride on a road in at least one direction, including divided roads
• I didn't focus on bike paths, but if one helped me get where I was going, I used it

I enjoyed this project. I visited parts of Boulder I had never seen before. I started to connect disparate parts of Boulder by era of development and design commonalities. For example, some residential neighborhoods have dead-end circles with parking in the middle. I found this design in a few places scattered across the city. All the older parts of Boulder have alleys, but mid-century developments stopped using them, likely because developers wanted to save money. However, some of the newest developments in Boulder have brought them back, because they are useful and a good idea, which I think is excellent.

Again, the project was fun, but I'm looking forward to getting back to more normal riding, where I'm not constantly changing direction and checking my GPS map for where I need to go next.

Here are some statistics:

• It took me 18 rides total
• 37 hours and 17 minutes of riding time
• 887 KM of distance
• 7,300 meters of climbing

Here's an animation of my progress¹. The date and time is shown in the bottom right corner. To get the full effect, you'll want to view it on YouTube, full screen the video, and switch to 4K resolution. You can adjust the playback speed to make the video run faster, if you like. There are a few hiccups in the animation where progress backtracks and repeats. It's not in the original file I uploaded to YouTube and I have no idea what's going on.

Finally, I've updated my cycling history map page to include all of this new data.

1. I used GPX Animator ↩︎